The latest research-related trip is now in the books. It wasn’t as ambitious as last year’s Wisconsin adventure, but it was valuable just the same, and yielded some pieces that will fill in some blanks (and provide the basis for an upcoming post or two that you may enjoy). And when I was in my room for the night, the time I might otherwise spend watching television was instead spent going through a couple more months in the ongoing search through Newspapers.com. It’s tedious work, capturing articles and logging them in the notebook I keep for such things, but it needs to get done.
As does the daily work of adding to the manuscript, which got done even on the road. It’s now been worked on in three states. By the time this project is finished, I wonder how many different locations I’ll have written it in. All I can say is that laptop computers are splendid things for writers.
Yesterday morning as I was scouring the stacks at a large university library, I was reminded again that the real fun in the process is in the discovery. It’s a feeling I’ve had any time I am lost in the stacks, and especially when the stacks are deep and the library is quiet. Before you and around you are what seem like miles of bound volumes, millions of pages from the past, and you can’t even begin to wonder what stories lie between those covers and what knowledge lies there waiting for somebody’s mind. To think about that vastness is to instantly boggle yourself. There’s just so much there in wait. And it’s yours, if you want it. All you have to do is reach out and take down a volume or two and sit at a table, and take it in. Voices of those long gone still carry on. Minds long dormant come back to life. Eras leap out of history books and sing electric, bringing you along for the ride.
Libraries are treasures. A good library needs to be cherished. It’s why I have what borders on an emotional reaction when I’m in a big library that keeps so much available, that’s held out against the ongoing movement to move material off-site or, worse, gut the holdings. Three libraries close to my life – one of them at my undergraduate institution, one at my graduate institution, stacks where I spent many an hour back in the day; the other at the institution where I now work – have had this happen. Now research at my grad school’s library is a complicated process that requires me to request material in advance, because material I once could go down to the stacks and get now needs to be brought over from an off-site storage facility. (But, hey, you can now get an expensive cup of trendy coffee at the big coffee shop on the main floor.) The other libraries? They are shadows of what they once were, and I can’t think about them too much lest I weep.
I love a good library. I worry about what’s going to become of them. I wonder how much longer I’ll be able to find a library like the one I was in yesterday, where I can go into these huge, endless stacks and feel lost in the most wonderful way possible. It’s so much of what drew me into the historian’s trade, and a feeling I can’t get enough of. I hope it’s a feeling that future generations will get to experience, too. But my fear is that feeling may itself become a part of history.
I sure do hope I’m wrong.